All children under the age of 6 in care must live with foster families in 2025

“The best way to protect vulnerable girls from the exploitation networks that seek them out and capture them in protection centers is to allow them to grow up in families or in small, flexible resources that allow personalized monitoring”. Based on this premise and in response to the dismantled prostitution networks in Madrid or the Balearic Islands, the Government and the communities have approved this Thursday a action plan against sexual exploitation in the public system that contemplates that, before 2026, no one under six in custody or guardianship by public entities live in a residential facility. And before 2031, no one under the age of 10 will live in a residence.

To achieve this, the plan contemplates that the Ministry of Social Rights will prepare a study on the “bottleneck” that prevent the deployment of family foster care, which includes guidelines to carry out the appropriate changes. Likewise, awareness campaigns will be carried out so that more families volunteer to welcome and standardized intervention models will be launched to “reduce declarations of helplessness”.

According to the latest available data, 35,883 minors they were in 2020 under the guard and tutelage of the public system. 53% in foster care and 47% in residences. The minor’s law, approved in 2015, established that, as a priority, in cases of violence and lack of protectionthe social services must ensure that the affected children remain in their families of origin and, if this is not possible, in a foster care regime with voluntary families, given that it is considered that the family environment is “essential in the development of childhood”, as long as there is no violence, according to the plan.

The fifth EU country

However, despite the approval of the law, the number of minors in residential centers has increased, going from 41.5% in 2014 to 47% in 2020. For this reason, Spain It is the fifth EU country with the highest percentage of children in care who live in a residential resource, which is partly due to the fact that since 2017 the arrival of children has been constant. unaccompanied minors coming from other countries.

Although the majority of children in residential care are between 15 and 17 years old (56%), 1,177 under six years lived in residences in 2020, to which must be added another almost 2,000 between 7 and 10 years old. And many of them do not leave the residential center until they are 18 years old, so they spend a good part of their childhood away from a family and that is why the plan has focused on them.

The causes

The approved strategy also analyzes the causes that favor the occurrence of sexual crimes: “The abusers find it easier to exploit this childhood than other girls and boys because, on the one hand, they suffer from double vulnerability, psychological and economic, and, on the other, because there are still some characteristics to be improved in the system, such as the low intensity of psychological care for damage repair; the high percentage of children in residential care or the existence -albeit a minority- of large residences”. Likewise, a “deficient gender perspective” has been detected in public interventions.

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To correct these problems, the plan states that, in the short term, will form in prevention and detection of these crimes to the workers of residential centers. In addition, a “harmonized protocol” with specific actions to prevent and intervene in these cases, connecting all administrations, which will be accompanied by a “common action guide” for detection, notification and referral to specialized services, which should be launched in the first half of this year.

“It is very good news that in this country, given the current times that question gender-based violence, a unanimous agreement. There is still an institutional agreement in the fight against violence against women”, highlighted the Secretary of State for Equality, Ángela Rodríguez, accompanied by the Secretary of State for Social Rights, Nacho Álvarez, after signing the agreement.